Telecommunication networks are experiencing continued rapid traffic increase mostly driven by the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive applications. Unfortunately, the revenues for network operators are not growing at the same pace. To continue supporting the growth of Internet-based applications in an economically viable manner, the industry must reduce the cost per bit transported and increase capacity. While increasing the deployed capacity is costly, improving traffic grooming and shaping becomes important to better utilize the capacity provided. Traffic shaping policies are often used by ISPs to limit bandwidth costs especially when it comes to bulk data transfers. In spite of their widespread use, such policies often lead to significant end-to-end performance losses. Furthermore, constrained by traditional protocols such as TCP and UDP, the increasing proportion of large file transactions (e.g. VoD, IPTV, CDN content update and distribution and so on), places an increasing burden on the network hardware and capacity of current IP networks.
In the increasingly important Data Center (DC) environment, efficient intra-DC and inter-DC networks play a crucial role in minimizing congestion and conserving computational resources. These networks must provide predictable performance for diverse and unpredictable load conditions. Managing this unpredictability generally translates into inefficiency in the use of transport resources such that associated transport costs become appreciable, particularly for wide-area inter-DC networks. In this context, a network that is able to provide predictable network performance for random traffic patterns would be a desirable feature.
In parallel, recent standardization of transport architectures such as ITU-T G.709/G.872 Optical Transport Network (OTN) has provided a key step towards a more flexible and efficient transport infrastructure layer, enabling protocol agnostic transport services, allowing a more efficient use of deployed capacity and simplifying management operations. This widely deployed standard provides well-defined mappings of most existing and future higher layer formats into a common underlying transport layer.